MaryAnn L. Miller

MaryAnn L. Miller

As it Comes ApartWe watch from the shadow of the ship, fog layers parting, a polar laceration.The glacier slips its edgesa mountain of ice torques into crackle.Trilobites topple into dust; lichenswaver in vertiginous shackle.Travel back into it. Shed the shackle;look down into the vertical. Slippingcrystals whiplash into lichens––burnt, year after year, maceratedin extra liquid, nothing left to crack,all turns to lace in the air. No edgesremain as we dive off prosperity’s ledges;dive into a lack of shackles,an absence of clackingmolecules tempered into slip,fractal coastline serrated.Our frozen breath flashes likenedto a knife thin melt, liquidwhere there will be no edge.Ice has been incapacitated.Light caves clash with sea shacklesa rock awning shifts, a scarp shipsthe dark mouth of violent wrack.A dark month of violet wrathwe must live through, unlikeall we knew as childrensitting along the schoolroom’s selvage.It’s enough to raise a pedant’s hackles.Some things should never lose capacity, but here is proof that heat is capacious.Flame always finds the cracks.It will push its bleeding knucklesthrough splits, through frightenedptarmigans nesting in sedges,disturbing the primal pact. The lip between ice and water lost, pursed mouth anticipation sags: debacle.

Nobody’s Desdemona or Get Out of Bed and Make Something of YourselfI have never wanted to be anyone’s Desdemona.If I’m going to be blinded by ambition it will be in the glare of my own headlights.I come from coal and a Colt revolver,from ditch clay dug for Aladdin’s lamp.My father in his basement machine shop where he made rifles for hunters, told me he wouldmortgage the house if that’s what it took to pay for college.Was it mirage that scintillated, kept me hoping? If you wanted something, learn how to make it. Maybe anyone could do it. But not anyone could and that’s where my path became tangledwith brambles and weeds of the girls can’t do math andother nonsense blindsided by the decisions of others.From then on it was one necessity after another as motherof my re-invention. My body was sabotage, a riot of propagation,another baby, another degree, another bifurcation.Suburbia was an indenture eased by microwave and carpool. After the marathon from practice to lessons the playroom morphed into a studio.I made a painting of a woman contorted to fit into a house too small to contain her, another of an infant feeding herself through her own umbilical cord, brush in one hand book in the other.That infant woman did not lie on the strangling bed; she jumped up, reached the pedals, stole away into dawn––her degrees riding shotgun on the passenger seat.Re-invention is extension–– of what’s already withinkindled by why not, if you don’t believe me just watch,and how do you like me now.Nonna DulaI step out into the midnight moon pistol in my pocketsilent owl shadowsa twig cracks under my heel I hear my eyelids blinkmy satchel’s thump against my left thigh with each stride bottles of elixir clink inside.I count steps to gauge my earnings, the cost of hundreds of steps in darknessI never count in daylight.I’ll soon pull a baby quiet as a fish slap it into sound.I want coffee and risen bread when I finish with this squalling mother;the relief of eating from a neighbor’s loafthe better part of my fee.The WeedThere it was–– an aberrant nuisancesticking up above her shrubslike an attention-seeking child.It’s a maple in the wrong place I said.We have to pull it after the movie she said.An hour and a half of Florence Foster Jenkinswringing out our hearts we forgot about The Weed.During dinner we discussed pulling it but not in the dark. Tomorrow. It had now become an entity as in:Tomorrow we pull The Weed.Still, it lived on. Two days later she emailed.Did you pull The Weed?No I said maybe it was the house elf. But it was her husband who in the wisdom of years quietly unseenlet the plucked weed demonstrate his love for her.Time LapseWrite it now while it droops on the vinebefore it puckers and desiccates.Raisin wine has too much of itself in it.A fresh Riesling cuts the cloying ego.Every night brings a new glass––filled, emptiedanother story sloughed.Prune the vines in the March mudplod to an empty coop fragrant with straw.The farmhouse wife refuses to twist the neck again.She breaks the eggs before any hatchlings skelter.The hen won’t shelter them under her wingswill not return to her nest.She slips beyond the vineyard learns a new tongue.“New friends every five years,” her mottoher mantra, “I have no problems.”

Bio:MaryAnn L. Miller’s most recent book of poems is Cures for Hysteria (Finishing Line Press 2018.) She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in Stillwater Review, Wordgathering, Kaleidoscope, International Review of African American Art and others. Her birth name is Grippo and she thinks the names in her family are music: Annunziata, Mafalda, Egidio, Pasquale, Maria Grazia, Epiphaneta, Angelina, Dolorata, Columbina. You can contact her at Lucia Press.